Guns and Rights

I am not an advocate for the right to bear arms and I am not against the right to bear arms. I am against the feeling of the government trying to force new laws upon law abiding citizens.

Most of the discussion after the last couple school shooting has been focused on the types of guns which should be allowed for an individual to own. I am in agreement with this proposal. We don’t allow folks to own many types of dangerous weapons, so why not put a limit on the most dangerous types of guns, especially the ones that would not be used most likely for hunting and target practice.

The danger is though, once we start a particular type of limitation, the same argument can be used again and again. If in the Newtown shooting only high powered pistols, or low powered rifles been used, would we be having this discussion, if yes, they there lies the danger of the beginning of limits.

But, if you were to come to me and ask: Should be there be limits on the types of guns people can own and who can own them, I would say yes, for sure.

Yesterday as I was doing some research to try and solidify my position on gun laws, I found an article which analyzed the last 50 mass shootings, excluding the most recent. One statistic just shocked me! The people who had done the shooting, overwhelmingly used guns that were acquired LEGALLY!!!!!

I did not study how each of them obtained them, either from friends, parents, off the street, gun shows or other 3rd party, but it did ring a bell with me that somehow, folks that are doing the shooting could have been given a bit more of a deterrent to own the gun, thus a possibly minimizing the number of mass shootings.

Two events led me to do the above research. Firstly, the shooter in Newtown CT, he got the guns from his mother who owned them legally. The second was an 11 year old took a legally owned gun to his school in UT.

So the question becomes, if you, a sane person, a blessed life, passes the most tight gun ownership tests and laws who owns a gun or guns, how are they now kept out of the hands of those who might use them to kill?

The Newtown shooter new where his mom had them and even was taught to shoot. The 11 year old boy simply grabbed the gun from the house and took it to school, so how do these new abundant laws prevent this from happening?

It comes down to personal responsibility for those who own the guns. If the mom had not been shot and died, I think she should have had equal responsibility in the shootings of the innocent children. The parents of the 11 year old should also be held equally as accountable for his taking the gun to school.

We tend to compare our killings with guns with other nations, I don’t think it is a direct comparisons. We are a nation which was built on gun ownership, so even though other nations possibly have stricter laws and less deaths by gun, the nature of the two counties is completely different and hard to compare, I believe.

I believe the question becomes this: Is it better to take the guns away and hope this reduces the number of deaths by guns or would it be better for the innocent to arm themselves or seek the protection of those with arms to defer those that would want to harm them?